What Keywords are Selling Your Ebooks: A Step-by-Step Analysis

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could find out what keywords buyers are typing into the search box on Amazon when they buy your ebooks? You can! The Reverse ASIN Lookup on Publisher Rocket does that and so much more.

What’s an ASIN?

ASIN stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number. It’s Amazon’s version of an ISBN, which is the worldwide standard for identifying books. ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number.

You could also call an ASIN a product identification number for ebooks, as each book has a different one. While Amazon uses the ISBN to identify all of the print books in its catalog, it uses only ASINs to identify ebooks. Even if you provide an ISBN when you upload your ebook, it will appear in the store under an ASIN.

What are keywords in the Kindle Store?

The words that buyers type into the search box on Amazon’s Kindle store are keywords. So, our goal with keywords is to have our books come up in keyword searches that generate sales.

Below, you can see an Amazon search for the keyword phrase, the lion and the mouse. My beginner reader chapter book, The Lion and the Mouse: An Aesop Fable Beginner Reader Mouse Story, appeared at the top of the second page of search results.

Screenshot of Amazon search page — *Amazon search page results for keyword search, the lion and the mouse.*

You’d think page 2 of a keyword search should be great, wouldn’t you? I mean that made it #11 of 311 results, as you can see on the left side of the second line in the screenshot above. However, when it comes to sales it’s unfortunately not putting much money in my pocket!

How popular are these keywords?

Finding out how many people search for specific keywords isn’t all that easy.

One way we try to figure out what’s popular is to start typing a phrase into a search box and see what comes up in the autocomplete. Here are my results on Amazon.

Screen shot of Amazon search page showing autocomplete

So, it looks like the lion and the mouse is the most popular search. Should be good, right? Maybe — maybe not.

There’s an easier way to find out what search terms and phrases a book actually comes up under on Amazon.

What keywords did the book really come up for?

This is where Publisher Rocket’s Reverse ASIN Lookup comes in. I purchased Publisher Rocket a number of years ago and have since become an affiliate as I believe so strongly in what it can do (so if you purchase Publisher Rocket, I earn a commission at no extra cost to you).

But back to finding out what keywords the ebook really came up for in Amazon searches. Here’s the report from Publisher Rocket.

Publisher Rocket Reverse ASIN lookup for the lion and the mouse

The keywords and their analysis included:

Linda Aksomitis (that’s me of course!)
The Lion and the Mouse – average sales (monthly earnings for books ranking under this keyword phrase) of $3; less than 100 searches for this keyword phrase per month; and a competition score of 50 (meaning quite competitive).
the lion and the mouse aesop fable – average sales (monthly earnings for books ranking under this keyword phrase) of $3; less than 100 searches for this keyword phrase per month; and a competition score of 1 (meaning basically no competition).
adventures for beginning readers – average sales (monthly earnings for books ranking under this keyword phrase) of $9; less than 100 searches for this keyword phrase per month; and a competition score of 20 (meaning not too competitive).
magical adventures beginning chapter – average sales (monthly earnings for books ranking under this keyword phrase) of $17; less than 100 searches for this keyword phrase per month; and a competition score of 9 (meaning very little competition).
beginning reader mouse – average sales (monthly earnings for books ranking under this keyword phrase) of $33; less than 100 searches for this keyword phrase per month; and a competition score of 9 (meaning very little competition).
lion and mouse – average sales (monthly earnings for books ranking under this keyword phrase) of $42; less than 100 searches for this keyword phrase per month; and a competition score of 11 (meaning little competition).

Okay, so that was interesting. There’s not really a lot of hope for big $$$ here, is there?

Now to see how the keywords I was found under aligned with the seven keywords that Amazon allows you to pick when you upload the book.

Amazon’s 7 Keyword Choices

Let’s take a look at the keywords I thought would attract buyers to my book.

keyword selection on Amazon — *Keyword selection on Amazon*

The keywords I entered, as you can see on the screenshot, were:

Aesop fable for children
easy mouse books
circus
kindness
helping others
easy lion books
tornado fiction

Okay, so the closest keywords I came to matching what the book was really found under was…well, basically none.

If you’re wondering how the ebook came up under these keywords at all, it’s because they appear in the book title, subtitle, and description. Luckily!

How is all this going to help sell more books?

If you’re thinking this looks like a lost cause, you’re right. Without some additional insights I can’t hope for any increases in sales, mainly because all of the keywords my ebook came up for had less than 100 searches a month.

But there is a way to improve the odds!

The next step is to identify better selling ebooks similar to mine and do a competition analysis with Publisher Rocket. Since the most lucrative phrase the ebook was found under was lion and mouse, that’s where I started.

A competition analysis revealed that my ebook ranked 9th. Woo-hoo! Only two children’s titles were estimated to make more money than I did monthly. I say that because the “adult” title, Dirty Kisses (The Lion and the Mouse series Book 1), made substantially more than any of the children’s books at $156 estimated earnings monthly.

However, when I looked closely at the earnings they only changed based on the cost of the ebook. Hum….

The great thing about the Competition Analyzer is that it also lets you see what categories these books are ranking for. As well, you can get the sales rank you’d need to achieve to get to #1 in each category.

Examining all that, though, there’s still nothing here to indicate there’s any hope for reasonable sales with what I was using.

Is there another option?

Can the reverse ASIN lookup help here?

Yes, the reverse ASIN lookup can make a big difference here!

However, you’ll need to do some footwork searching on Amazon for best sellers similar to your ebooks. Then, you can insert their ASINs and see what keywords they’ve used.

Many years ago I was a children’s librarian, so I have an advantage when it comes to what’s popular with young age groups. So, I started my searches with mouse books. The Amazon Kindle category, Children’s Mice & Small Animal Stories, seemed perfect.

I looked at Big and Small, however, it was for kids aged 1-5 rather than beginner readers. I needed to find a title for older kids that were looking for adventures. The Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear seemed to fill the bill.

However, when I looked up its ASIN I discovered nearly all the keywords were for bears. Scanning the top 100 titles in this category I couldn’t find much else that looked promising. I guess mice have been replaced by squirrels.

Next stop, Children’s Lion, Tiger, & Leopard Books. I picked the day’s #1 title, Juko & Jengo, and started my investigation again.

Now here were some better keyword choices when I looked at earnings! These keywords were all more to do with picture books — and although The Lion and the Mouse is a beginner reader it’s highly illustrated with an image on every page. It would be shelved in the E section of the library with all the other picture books. That makes it a fit, right?

Here’s the keyword list I decided to try on Amazon’s 7 allowed keywords — plus I decided to reconsider the subtitle of the ebook:

picture ebooks – average sales (monthly earnings for books ranking under this keyword phrase) of $315,444; 593 searches for this keyword phrase per month; and a competition score of 65 (quite a bit of competition).
ebooks kindle books kids – average sales (monthly earnings for books ranking under this keyword phrase) of $1,053; 1864 searches for this keyword phrase per month; and a competition score of 4 (meaning some competition).
adventure picture books – average sales (monthly earnings for books ranking under this keyword phrase) of $183; 390 searches for this keyword phrase per month; and a competition score of 3 (meaning basically no competition).
picture books kindle – average sales (monthly earnings for books ranking under this keyword phrase) of $3,377; less than 100 searches for this keyword phrase per month; and a competition score of 11 (meaning limited competition).
adventure book for pictures – average sales (monthly earnings for books ranking under this keyword phrase) of $139; less than 100 searches for this keyword phrase per month; and a competition score of 20 (meaning a little competition).

Key Takeaways

The biggest takeaway here is that you need to be found under keywords that are frequently searched to make much money. Well that, or be in a very popular keyword niche for buyers.

Picture from the Lion and the Mouse by Linda Aksomitis. — Picture from *The Lion and the Mouse*.

We all knew that, of course. However, finding out what keyword terms and phrases are searched is pretty much impossible without a tool like Publisher Rocket.

While following this research, you likely realized as I did that focusing on the book being a retelling of a fable for marketing was a mistake. Less than 100 searches a month don’t make for much income.

So, I had to back up and look at the big picture. Literally. I’ll let you know how it works in a few months!

Update After 6 Weeks

So, what happened? Well, at first the results looked stellar as the title jumped 1,325,199 places to #371,425 in the U.S. Best Sellers Rank. It placed in the top 55 in three categories a week later. Woo hoo!

However, things fell off pretty quickly. So, I did some more investigating and decided to try yet another new feature of Publisher Rocket. I’ll walk you through that here.

Get Publisher Rocket

You may also be interested in the K-Lytics report on children’s literature. It’s a good introduction to the different genres, to help you figure out what’s selling. The seminars are easy to use and navigate, too.

Click for the Children’s eBook Seminar

Need help writing your Web promotional materials? Join me in my course, Write Effective Web Content. The course is also offered through Gale courses in public libraries in North America. Your library may even pay the registration fees for you!